Character · Erased
Satoru Fujinuma
A twenty-nine-year-old pizza delivery driver with a superpower he never asked for and cannot aim.
In Otakana the clue reads: Man who is thrown back to 1988 to stop a killer
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Erased
- Letters
- 6 · Hard
Satoru Fujinuma calls it Revival. Without warning he rewinds a few seconds or minutes, lands just before something terrible, and has to work out what it is before time catches up. It has saved a child from a truck. It has never once told him what it wanted. His manga career has stalled, his conversations go badly, and he narrates his own life like a man reviewing someone else's rough draft.
Then the rewind overshoots. Instead of five minutes he gets eighteen years, and he is eleven again in 1988, in a Hokkaido winter, sitting two desks from a girl who is about to be murdered. He keeps his adult memory and loses everything else that would help. No phone, no money, no way to make an adult believe him, and a body that gets tired walking home in the snow.
What makes him work as a lead is that he is not clever enough to shortcut it. He plans badly, blurts things out, and gets further with sincerity than strategy. Kei Sanbe wrote the manga from 2012, A-1 Pictures ran twelve episodes in early 2016, and Netflix produced a live-action Japanese series from the same story in 2017.
Spelling SATORU
SATORU is the given name, six letters, and it is worth knowing that the library holds a second Satoru in Gojo of Jujutsu Kaisen. Same spelling, no relation. It comes from a verb meaning to realise or comprehend, which is a heavy name for a man who spends the story failing to understand what he is being shown. Three clean beats, sa-to-ru.